October 2011

Like Dracula, he is Romanian, seals himself inside from the sun, and is most active at night. And those with files in the GraphicRiver queue might say he inspires just as much fear. This week we meet Constantin Potorac, regular writer for Psdtuts+ and reviewer for GraphicRiver.

What is it like working for Envato, and what are some of the jobs you’ve had with us?

Do you find copyright a little fuzzy? Over the next week we’ll bring you four helpful articles on copyright from the Envato Wiki. This article can be found on the wiki here, and answers some frequently asked questions about copyright.

Do you have any questions not covered in these articles? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll put something together to clarify.

Complete Guide to Photo Sharpening in Photoshop

As a photographer or retoucher, you learn that not all images are perfectly sharp in all the right places straight from the camera. You might make adjustments in Lightroom, Camera RAW, or in Photoshop but it often takes a little post work if your otherwise perfect shot wasn’t right on the mark.

In this retouching tutorial we’re going to look at making Photoshop work for us in a way that wasn’t entirely intended, skipping the default sharpening tools and using the often under-utilised High Pass filter to create a completely independent and editable sharpening layer.

Open your image and drag the Background Layer to the New Layer icon to duplicate it;

Members Only Tutorial

This tutorial is available exclusively to our FanExtra members. In order to read the tutorial and download it’s original .psd source file you must sign up as a FanExtra member.

If you sign up today you get access to hundreds of design files, including tutorial source files, members only tutorials, vectors, icon packs, texture packs and more! You can also access our huge collection of .psd website interfaces such as this one.

Members Area Tutorial: Photo Manipulate a Complex Falling Angel Scene

Final Image

Flash is a really good tool for delivering video content on the internet. A good example of this is youtube.com which delivers all of its videos through flash. In this tutorial I will show you how to use the power of flash to deliver video content on your website.

First thing you need to do is to open a new document in Flash. Now to import a video go to File>Import>Import video from the top menu.

Flash has made all the video importing process really simple and easy. As soon as you click on the import video button, you will see a video import wizard open up.

Creating ‘The Vampire Hunter’ a Dark Photo Manipulation

In this tutorial i will show you how to create a dark photo manipulation called “The Vampire’s Hunter”. We will go through steps with different techniques of manipulating, retouching, masking, coloring, adjustment layers, understanding light and shadow and more.

Final Image

Most of the flash applications on the internet are very rich in content and this makes their file size quite large as compared to other components in a website. If a user visits a webpage with some heavy flash content then it might take some time before the flash components actually appears. This can be disastrous because it might make users navigate away from the site even before they see it. To solve this problem we make use of preloaders. A preloader is light weight and it appears on screen quickly and shows the user how much of the flash content has been loaded. By making interesting and interactive preloaders, developers can make the users wait on the website long enough for the flash content to be completely loaded.

Before we start making the Flash preloader, I want you to know that you need to have basic flash knowledge and a little bit of know-how of ActionScript 3.0 in order to understand this tutorial.

My wife is always on my case to take more photos. I guess I’m the kind of photographer that likes to have everything align perfectly before I press the button. Recently, PhotoDune photographer extraordinaire Yuri Arcurs uploaded another 12,000 more photos!

A lot of people who don’t know that much about Flash think that Flash is good only for animation and static web applications. This belief is very false because with Flash you can create applications which are as dynamic as you want them to be. To make a dynamic Flash application, we need a way for Flash to read external data. This way we can not only make a small database for flash but we can also use that data to make other parts of a website able to communicate with Flash. The most commonly used medium of data transfer for Flash is XML. Flash has built in methods to read and process XML files, so reading an XML file is a piece of cake and that is what makes XML the preferred choice of communication with Flash.

Final Image

Preferring a smaller desk, having a mug that holds a full pint of tea, keeping his web development skills sharp, and grappling with the correct term to use for those on Team Envato. This week we meet Michael James Williams, editor of Activetuts+ and Android.AppStorm.

What is your position in Envato, and what has it been like to work with us so far?

I’m the Editor for both Activetuts+ and Android.AppStorm, two of Envato’s blogs. Activetuts+ is all about helping readers become better developers of browser apps and games, and Android.AppStorm is basically a showcase for awesome Android apps.

Members Only Tutorial

This tutorial is available exclusively to our FanExtra members. In order to read the tutorial and download it’s original .psd source file you must sign up as a FanExtra member.

If you sign up today you get access to hundreds of design files, including tutorial source files, members only tutorials, vectors, icon packs, texture packs and more! You can also access our huge collection of .psd website interfaces such as this one.

Members Area Tutorial: Create a Mixed Media Effect in Photoshop

Final Image

Interactive web pages and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are one of the best areas of Flash. Making these applications requires a moderate amount of ActionScript knowledge along with the know-how of making the User Interface. In this tutorial I am going to teach you how to make buttons in Flash since buttons are the most important feature of the user interface. This tutorial will only teach you how to design and implement an interactive button in flash, I would not touch the topic of ActionScript here.

Before I start, if you are looking for a very easy way out of this tutorial, you can make a free Flash website with Wix with any Flash buttons you desire. If you still want to read this Flash tutorial, let me continue.

ThemeForest is now accepting BuddyPress templates. If you’ve never heard of BuddyPress it’s a social networking system built on top of the WordPress platform. It allows you to build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community all based on the power and flexibility of WordPress. Totally open source, BuddyPress is built to bring groups of people together allowing them to communicate and interact together right inside your WordPress theme. Here are some examples of how BuddyPress can be used:

Best Tutorials for the Puppet Warp Tool, Extractions, and other Reality Distortion Techniques in Photoshop CS5

One of the new, mind-blowing features in Photoshop CS5 is the Puppet Warp Tool. It gives you the ability to manipulate an image in incredible new ways and has many different applications, from deftly alterting the shape of an object in a photo to moving an object to another location in an image and much more.

Living on the bottom of Africa, being fascinated and inspired by her dad’s signwriting, “freedom comes from self-discipline”, and creating a font that Apple put on the iPhone. This week we meet Joanne Taylor (Joiaco) from GraphicRiver.

If you’re an Envato marketplace author and would like to be interviewed for the blog, head over to this form. We’d love to hear from you.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from, what do you do for a living?

Hello everyone, I’m Scott, I’m the Seed Content manager at Envato (more on my role later) but you probably know me as “the dude in the forums with an insane number of marketplaces badges“! That always makes me laugh whenever I hear that. I guess that’s what happens when you live and breathe on the marketplaces for so long.

This tutorial is all about animation in Flash. Animation is one of the core elements of Flash. In fact animation is the very reason Flash was originally created. In Flash animation is extremely easy and very powerful. For anyone willing to learn flash, this is the one thing they must know. This tutorial covers the elementary animation techniques in Flash at the absolutely beginner level.

Before I begin, if you want a very easy way out of this tutorial, you can make a free Flash website with Wix that will have mind-blowing animation. Now for those of you who are still interested in reading the tutorial, I will continue.

Design a Scenic Out of Frame Photo Manipulation

Resources Used In This Tutorial

Dynamic and scalable Flash slideshows embedded in websites is one of the things Flash works best for. In this slideshow tutorial you will learn to develop a simple slideshow in Flash. i.e. you will learn how to make the backbone of a Flash slideshow. You can then use the same method to implement all sorts of slideshows and you can build up functionality on this basic slideshow.

The AppStorm team have been hard at work again. Here is a huge bunch of great free apps and web services they covered.

Mac.AppStorm

Raven: Site-Specific Browsing Like You’ve Never Seen It

A site-specific browser allows you to have the convenience of a dedicated desktop app wrapped around a website. You’ve seen these before and might even have a few Fluid or Prism apps sitting in your dock. Even so, you’ve never seen an app quite like Raven before.

Since officially launching back in August, Envato Extras has nearly doubled in size. Extras is the site to go to for all your Envato API needs. We’ve recently added some helpful API tutorials along with a bunch of new tools.

Of all the many marketplaces we run here at Envato, the one I use the most myself is GraphicRiver. So I was very excited to get to pick out $500 of files from GraphicRiver and PhotoDune to include in a Graphic Designer Bundle which is now on sale for just $20!

Each month, we bring together a selection of the best tutorials and articles from across the whole Tuts+ network. Whether you’d like to read the top posts from your favourite site, or would like to start learning something completely new, this is the best place to start!

The Released: Create a Dark and Surreal Photo Manipulation

In this tutorial i’m going to show you how to do a dark and surreal photo manipulation called “Released”. You will learn how to manipulate stock photos in a proper way, adjust light and shadow correctly, make a good use of adjustment layers and blending modes and more!

Dabbling with programming languages, watching an unhealthy number of films, studying anthropology and photojournalism, releasing material with the world’s leading record labels. Meet the Tuts+ Marketplace team.

Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that actual human beings that sort through each and every submission to the Tuts+ Marketplace on a daily basis. The following staff members make up our review team and are all an integral part of both Tuts+ and other Envato projects. They also each have a huge passion for their area of expertise and are super friendly, so feel free to say hello to them!